{"id":14624,"date":"2016-01-03T16:00:21","date_gmt":"2016-01-03T21:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/?p=14624"},"modified":"2016-01-03T16:00:21","modified_gmt":"2016-01-03T21:00:21","slug":"connecting-fans-rivals-and-brands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/connecting-fans-rivals-and-brands\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting fans, rivals and brands: Meredith L. Starkey \u201999"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>

A portrait of Meredith Starkey in Seattle, Washington, on Aug. 26, 2014. Photo by Ackerman + Gruber<\/p><\/div>\n

During her undergraduate years at Clemson, Meredith Starkey couldn\u2019t escape sports \u2014 not that she wanted to. She didn\u2019t simply attend athletic events, she owned them \u2014 dancing in the east endzone with the Rally Cats and tossing orange T-shirts to fans in Littlejohn Coliseum. Whenever she wasn\u2019t on the field, she excelled in her marketing courses interacting with Clemson\u2019s athletic sponsors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, 15 years later, Starkey has channeled her passion for competition into a career with one of the largest wireless companies in the nation. As T-Mobile\u2019s director of sponsorships, entertainment and events, Starkey seeks out sponsorship and event marketing opportunities to spread the company\u2019s core message. Although she\u2019s no longer on the sidelines in Death Valley, she\u2019s still at the heart of crowd engagement.
\nToday, inside Memorial Stadium, more and more fans spend time staring at their smartphone screens. But this doesn\u2019t necessarily take away from the spectator experience. With just a tap of a thumb, fans can generate photos, videos and social media posts to share with friends, family and rivals who couldn\u2019t be at the event.
\nIt\u2019s Starkey\u2019s responsibility to capture the attention of these fans and paint T-Mobile as the choice carrier for sharing these moments. It\u2019s not easy competing against larger wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T, with big names and bigger budgets. But, Starkey rises to the challenge, employing the creative perspective she gained while firing up fans at Clemson.
\nAfter a year of negotiating contracts and unraveling legal tape, Starkey closed on a huge sponsorship deal that gave T-Mobile exclusive Major League Baseball rights. During the World Series in Minneapolis, Starkey and the T-Mobile team set up in-stadium ads encouraging fans to record and submit videos of themselves singing \u201cTake Me Out to the Ball Game\u201d from their smartphones. Then, they showed the video mash-up during the \u201cseventh-inning stretch.\u201d
\nAs Clemson\u2019s former Rally Cat captain leads the charge to strengthen T-Mobile\u2019s brand messaging, she will also make the game-day experience more universal \u2014 one snap, share and selfie at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During her undergraduate years at Clemson, Meredith Starkey couldn\u2019t escape sports \u2014 not that she wanted to. She didn\u2019t simply attend athletic events, she owned them \u2014 dancing in the east endzone with the Rally Cats and tossing orange T-shirts to fans in Littlejohn Coliseum. Whenever she wasn\u2019t on the field, she excelled in her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":14510,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[171,3299,3300],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-14624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumniprofiles","tag-alumni-profile","tag-winter-2016","tag-winter-2016-alumni-profiles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2015\/12\/Meredith-Starkey.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14624"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=14624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}